As outlined in part 1, online newsrooms are an essential tool in helping you to engage better with your key audiences, increase your exposure, and protect your brand’s reputation.

As Sam Phillips explained in his post, it is now essential for corporate communication teams to be able to demonstrate their value. Setting up and measuring key performance indicators (KPI’s) has become fundamental to evaluating the performance of an online newsroom and proving its success and presenting its value at director level.

1. Focus on what matters

First of all, it is important to start with your objectives in mind when establishing your KPI’s. You may be looking to increase the number of repeat visits or sign-ups to your corporate communications via the newsroom.

2. Use analytics to monitor your traffic

Treat your newsroom like a corporate website and implement an analytics solution to allow you to analyse traffic and user behaviour.  This is a great way of providing you with insight so that you can understand how people get to your site and what content they like. Some basic KPI’s are listed below:

• Number of visits
• Number of unique visits
• Average time spent
• Sources of traffic i.e. search engines, blog, social media

Google Analytics is a good free solution that can be used.

3. Evaluate your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Understanding how your newsroom is performing in the major search engines allows you to ensure your optimisation work is paying off.  If you’re not showing within the top 20 results, the chances are you could be missing out on lots of relevant traffic.

Some basic SEO KPI’s:

1. Number of pages indexed – this allows you to understand how easy it has been for the search engines to read and index your content
2. Number of external links – this allows you to assess how popular your content has been as people are linking to it. It’s also a really important factor when it comes to gaining a high ranking in Google
3. The range of keywords driving traffic to your site – if you’re only being found for brand related terms then you could be missing out on a ton of traffic for keywords which relate to your products or services

If you’re providing multimedia content on your newsroom you should also look at the ranking of your assets on the search engines.

Use “link:www.yourdomain.com” within Google or Yahoo to assess link popularity, or site: www.yourdomain.com to analyse the number of pages indexed.  Tip: Yahoo is a bit more transparent when it comes to disclosing the actual volumes. 

4. Measure through Social Media

If you have prominent links/feeds from your social media channels within your newsroom, on a basic level you should be monitoring the number of people who ‘like’ you on Facebook and the number of followers you have on Twitter.

Another simple way to use social media is to incorporate Facebook “Like” and Twitter “Re-Tweet” buttons. They automatically count the number of interactions and will allow you to easily identify your most popular stories.

5. Access full engagement reports

Taking it a step further, an online newsroom combined with a communication management platform will provide you with much richer reporting. This powerful combination will track engagements, such as:

- Number of visits per release
- Number of interactions with each of your assets (e.g. watched video, downloaded a document)
- Number of media requests

In effect, it will allow you to understand the success of each of your releases and assets.

Adding login access to your newsroom will make you aware of each individual visitor, allowing you to track the success of your communications based on your key contacts.

6. Evaluate the impact in the media

Good monitoring and evaluation tools allow you to analyse your offline and online coverage and link it to each of your releases. As stated in the Barcelona Principles, “measuring the effect on outcomes is preferred to measuring outputs.”

Those tools can provide you with an in depth breakdown of those effects:

• Your coverage by release
• The tonality of your coverage per release (positive, neutral or negative)
• Evaluation of the coverage that is linked to your newsroom
• Share of voice amongst your competitors

Such a solution will let you understand the success of each of your stories and the impact that your newsroom has on your coverage.

These best practices should allow you to evaluate what has been popular and why so you can refine your future communications. You will also be able to demonstrate the newsroom’s overall success and Return on Investment.